The oysters explain the benefits

Ms. Gonick

Published 4:00 am, Friday, November 21, 2003

In previous failings, we learned how Ms. Gonick lost half her hearing and balance to a brain tumor, got it zapped, discovered that her rent- controlled apartment of 21 years was for sale and, upon developing facial tics (zapping + stress = neurological side effect), decided to return to school for a teaching credential so she could afford to do what she most abhorred: move. Having begun this series just after completing her first teaching job (at which she failed to teach anyone anything), she's been flashing back ever since, most recently to Sept. 11, 2001, when she suddenly saw her innocent young classmates the way Lewis Carroll's Walrus & Carpenter once saw the oysters they'd soon have for lunch.

It's beyond bratty to say that the events of Sept. 11 dampened my enthusiasm for school, so I'll say this instead: I didn't know I'd had any enthusiasm till after it left, and it seemed to do so just after Sept. 11. Then again, its disappearance might have been due to the shift into fall, the getting dark at 6, the lonely lurch to the parking lot after a night class, the standard check for the backseat rapist (now rapist/terrorist) before unlocking the car, the hallucinatory drive home (night vision iffy), the anthrax reports on the radio.

Whatever the reason, distinguishing verbal phrases from adjective clauses suddenly felt existentially stupid, like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory trying to prove they could work in a chocolate factory.

With World War III coming, I no longer thought about teaching Camus (high school students still read "L'Etranger"); I felt something had turned me into Camus and that I too was stuffing bonbons beneath my beret as hundreds more sailed right past me. It got to the point where I thought I should just drop out, lie down and eat the damn chocolates -- with liters of absinthe, of course, and a tin plate to hold the butts de Gauloise I'd chain-smoke to the tunes of Edith Piaf while waiting for the end to come. In Paris, preferably, but since that would mean flying, I supposed right here would do.

But because it was too late in the term (not to mention my life) to drop out of anything, I had my new study group come over instead. We were going to bone up on grammar, but since the four of them were still babes in their 20s, and oysters at that, we mostly ate Cheetos and talked about sex. Or rather, they talked about sex while I, who'd spent 40 years eschewing the Cheeto -- not to mention the Screaming Yellow Zonker my stoned generation (who'd actually invented sex so this one could talk about it) had devoured in college

-- ate half a bagful and opened another.

The conversation was very confusing.

"Friends with deficits?" I asked, echoing Miriam, who'd just been explaining how she managed sex when she didn't have a boyfriend or girlfriend. "What does that mean?"

Sam, my audio interpreter, wrote "benefits" on my exercise book.

"Oh," I said. "Benefits." Pause. "Huh?"

"Sex," Sam said into my left ear. "Secks," he repeated to make sure I got it. I heard him, but I still didn't get it.

"Buddies," declared Miriam, "you can also have sex with."

"With whom you can also have sex," I corrected, since this was a grammar group, and then I heard what I'd said and was horrified.

"Why would you have sex with a buddy?" I asked.

"No complications," an oyster explained.

"No ties," said another. "No expectations. No disappointments."

As these last two were boysters, I wasn't surprised, but I couldn't believe it of Miriam. Sex without drama? What was the point?

"So you're hanging out with your buddy and then you get bored but you can't find a good movie and the pizza's not there yet, so you just sort of decide to pass time having sex?"

They nodded.

"Miriam?" I said, giving her a dubious look.

"Really!" she said, nodding and grinning.

I went to the kitchen to pour my Diet Coke down the drain and came back with a full glass of wine.

"It's absinthe," I told them. "I'm too old to live."

A few days later I was walking to class weighing the pros and cons of hanging out with the young (pro: they're not homeowners either; con: depressing buddy revelations) when I truly became too old to live, or in any case, too insane to walk.

As my neurosurgeon would explain to me later, another festive side effect of brain radiation (besides the festive facial tics I was already enjoying) is an ataxic gait, which, just like the tics, is almost always brought on by stress. Since ataxia (from the Greek ataktos for not ordered) means "loss or lack of muscular coordination" and gait means gait, an ataxic gait means your walk gets disordered.

The first time it happened, it got so disordered it went out of order entirely, like an elevator that stops between floors and refuses to budge till the Otis man comes. I was between steps when my right foot, suddenly and without so much as a quiver of warning, decided to glue itself to the ground.

I kept trying to lift it and it kept resisting. When I finally realized I wasn't able to lift it, an instinctive vanity made me pretend that of course I was able to (unable being too close to disabled for this narcissist) but had chosen instead to stand in one place because it was better for thinking deep thoughts.

And I did think a deep thought: Has biochemical warfare struck the West Coast or am I standing in gum?

I looked around to see if anyone else on campus looked paralyzed, but they were all using both feet to zip this way and that, and I didn't see any gas masks.

Nor, unfortunately, did I see any of the oysters from my pretend-to-study- grammar group. Demented as they might be (about romance, that is, and I blamed my own generation for that, as we were the first to say, "Wanna ball?"), they were the only friends I'd made since returning to school, and if just one of them noticed me waving and yelling, I felt sure I could get him to yank my right foot out of its glue and carry me piggyback to my next class. (Another pro for hanging out with the young: strong; might help with paralysis.)

Alas, there was nary an oyster, not even a clam. I waved and yelled to everyone else, but as they were all using their cell phones (except for those using headphones), they were staring into that middle distance where no real human contact is made. School banners still shouted "Connect" and "Reflect" and, most unctuous of all, "Love Is Stronger Than Hate," but let me tell you right now: Forget the siren, the harpy, the wild -- nothing is stronger than the call of the cell. If Horton the elephant had gotten a cell phone (and surely he has at least seven by now), I was the last Who left in Who-ville screaming in vain for his attention.

Going to a happy place

Luckily, just thinking of being the last Who in Who-ville (a sort of nuclear, lonely, "On the Beach" thought) made my right eye so nervous it started to twitch, and this reminded me that telling myself I had lots of money had once calmed it down and made the twitch stop. Deciding that this foot thing probably stemmed from a neuro situation as well (right-sided tumor, right eye, right foot), I made myself think of a new soothing myth, and here it is, in case your foot ever glues itself to the ground:

I wasn't alone on a lawn on a campus but standing beside my own neurosurgeon, who had abandoned his entire life as he'd known it to devote himself to my post-op well-being. Insisting on never leaving my side (my left one, so I could hear his continuing words of praise and encouragement), he not only diagnosed my side effects as they occurred, but he also made them irrelevant by swooping me up in his huge hairy arms and carrying me to my next destination.

And, by the way, I still had lots of money and we were sailing to Paris to eat duck confit and wait a deux for the end.

I called this one "Fay Neuro Wray and Dr. King Kong."

Or "The Kongs Go to France And OD on Absinthe."

If you're insane enough, tricks like this work. Like Prometheus unglued, I brushed myself off and lurched onward to class.